Department of French and Italian

Broadly speaking, Applied Linguistics is the field of study that seeks to apply findings from core areas of linguistics to real-world issues. Our focus will be the application of selected findings in linguistics to the pedagogy of French as a foreign language in the United States. Inter alia, we will explore aspects of variability in French, including social, stylistic, and geographical variation, and implications of such variability for the FLE (français langue étrangère) classroom. Our study will be enriched by a survey of the linguistic situation in various Francophone regions of the world and lead to a discussion of the selection and development of standard norms and pedagogical norms. Along the way, we will explore what it means to be a native speaker / a near-native speaker / a heritage speaker, and why the native speaker construct has been problematized in the applied linguistic literature. We will also inquire what light immersion programs can shed on learning a foreign language in a classroom setting and pay some attention to issues of language policy in France and the Francophone world. 

Image: Map of the distribution of uvular/dorsal rhotics (e.g. [ʁ ʀ χ]) in northwestern continental Europe.

Attribution: Ƶ§œš¹, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons